Longing for Landscape: new Londoners’ sense of belonging and the representation of the city.

The paper focuses on the way literary representations of London in contemporary novels are affected by the characters’ ability to order their perception of place (here the city) into a landscape (or urbanscape). Two novels will be considered -Hanan Al-Shaik’s Only in London and Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet- to analyse the characters’ sense of belonging and the relation between space, perception and representation –or more specifically the notion of landscape- on the one hand, and their cultural identity, on the other. In order to explore what connects the representation of landscape to cultural identity, we need to make clear a few assumptions. First we need to consider that ‘landscape’ is more than the image of a territory, as represented by visual arts like painting, cinema, photography or by literature. Landscape is rather a way of seeing that conceptualises and organizes what is seen, according to the point of view of the observer (Gombrich, 1973), but it is also a social construct which includes a subjective ability to perceive and enjoy place (Cosgrove, 1990). We also assume that “the awareness of landscape always implies a sort of self-understanding: not only is the self positioned spatially within a landscape, but he is also placed in a psychological, historical and logical sense”. (Turco 2001) Thus, ‘Landscape’ is an ambiguous word that speaks at the same time of a real place and of the representation of that same place. The rules of representation are subjective and collective: as J.Berger reminds us the act of seeing is not natural but cultural. The way we see reflects our culture and our identity. What landscape of London can the Arab or the Chinese characters of Al-Shaik’s and Mo’s novels figure out for themselves? Have they developed a ‘sense of place’ that can organize their representation of London? In the paper we will try to analyse how London is very different to the eyes of the Chinese and the Arab characters of the mentioned novels, and how their feeling of belonging, their cultural roots, their interaction with British society are crucial in determining these differences.